A warning that we should all heed.

Victoria’s Commander of Testing and Community Engagement Jeroen Weimar has advised that there are “absolutely” still significant numbers of undetected cases of coronavirus in the state, despite five straight days with no new cases.

“We’re really encouraged by a number of days of zero cases (but) none of us believes that we’re over this,” he said.

“We still believe there are significant levels of COVID cases out there in the community. We have to continue to be very alert to those, and if we can ensure that we manage those outbreaks really quickly, then we can continue to ease off the restrictions.”

Asked if he thought there were still cases in Victoria yet to be identified through testing, Mr Weimar said: “Absolutely”, citing a recent case detected in Deer Park, 17km west of the Melbourne CBD, with no known source.

While all of the individual’s close contacts had been isolated and tested with no further positive results, Mr Weimar said it was a sign that there are more cases out there.

“I’m confident we’ve got (38) active cases that we know about. There will be other cases out there in the community. They may be asymptomatic. They may be at a very low level, they may not be,” he stated.

“The aim is aggressive suppression, and if you look at the scale of the testing operations, if you look at our test, trace and isolate system, if you look at the way we manage outbreaks, we’re all about aggressive suppression.”

“We are not heading for elimination. None of us should think that we’ve just dealt with it. There’s a long way to go.”